The 6 Most Common Misconceptions About HomeBinder

In the last several months we’ve been fielding a number of recurring questions about HomeBinder.

Despite efforts otherwise, many inspectors have come to think that our business model is based on soliciting clients. When in fact, our true north is the homeowner and our job is to make sure that they have a great app to manage their largest asset.

These are the most common misconceptions that home inspectors have about HomeBinder:

HomeBinder business is selling all our homeowner data to third parties.
This is not our business. We don’t do this.

HomeBinder makes outbound calls to solicit my clients and upsell services.
We don’t do this either directly OR indirectly (through a partner). This is not the business we are in as we heard from inspectors that they didn’t want to work with firms that did this as it leads to too many problems.

HomeBinder works with OneSource, therefore HB is selling customer data.
We do work with OneSource. That is absolutely true. But the misconception comes from HOW we work with them. We ONLY work with them if a homeowner asks for help with something that they can help them with. What this means practically is that last month (September 2017) 1.4% of new homeowners asked for help inside the HomeBinder application and ONLY those homeowners were connected with OneSource. No one else. We will help those that ask, not those that don’t, as we believe this to be the best approach.

To be a customer of HomeBinder you have to be a warranty customer.
Absolutely not true. 92% of our customers don’t use Complete Protection.

HomeBinder offers warranties so they are selling customer data.
Not true. Earlier this year we began to offer a warranty integration with Complete Protection because a portion of our customer base asked for us to offer a 90 day warranty program that met their needs. We saw that Complete Protection was a leader and didn’t fall into issues that typically befall the industry (and we encourage any firms that are interested to take a look at them through our integration or independently). What this means is that about 8% of our inspector customers want to, and choose to, use their warranty. ONLY those clients are setup with a 90 day warranty, no annual warranties are pushed on clients, and the inspector can even pick and choose which of their clients they want to set-up with a warranty. NO OTHER HomeBinder users are shared with Complete Protection.

Homeowners don’t use the binders setup for them.
This one regularly comes up but is far from the truth. What is true is that there is a wide range of engagement by homeowners depending on the inspection firm the are working with. Some have nearly all (90%) of their clients accept and use their HomeBinder account. Our top performers with homeowner engagement do several things such as bringing up HomeBinder at the time of the scheduling and at the inspection. If you’d like to learn more we’d encourage you to watch this video. https://support.homebinder.com/using-your-account/increase-client-login-rates

As you can see above the majority of questions are around customer data as this is a concern across the entire industry.

We MUST handle your customers, which become our users, with the utmost care. Why? The reason is two-fold:

Inspectors have told us that they want a reasonably priced service that does not sell client data or do outbound calls to the homeowner to push product or services. This is a paramount concern we’ve heard from Day 1 and we’ve oriented everything we do around this.

Our vision is to be THE platform that people use to manage and eventually sell their home. We cannot be shortsighted about annoying them by trying to sell them services out of the gate in the relationship. We’d only be hurting our brand and our vision. We need a relationship with that homeowner until they decide to sell (and then again in their next home).

If you are looking for a company with a big vision and that thinks different, you’ve come to the right place. If you thought different of us we hope that you understand who we are, and the direction we are going. We hope you’ll give HomeBinder a try and find out for yourself.

Anyone that has told you different about HomeBinder, we hope you ask yourself why?

No contracts, no hidden fees, no setup, no penalty for leaving. We’ll even pro-rate your current month if you want to leave. That’s just another example of how we “think different.”

I just recently became aware of your company. I will spend some time familiarizing myself later this week. I’ll tell you this much, you really need to keep a close eye on inspector confidence. Nick Gromiko has put confidence at an all time low with his recent biz moves.